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« THERE'S A RAT IN THE HOUSE... | Main | TEV GUEST REVIEW (AND INTERVIEW): KIM CHINQUEE'S OH BABY »

May 13, 2008

TEV GUEST REVIEW (AND INTERVIEW): MATTHEW SIMMONS’S CREATION STORIES

Creation Stories
By Matthew Simmons
Happy Cobra Books
40 pp
FREE

GUEST REVIEW BY JIM RULAND

There's a revolution afoot. In the fast-paced, billion-dollar industry of literary chapbooks, eletronic books or making substantial inroads.

That was a joke.

Sort of.

Electronic books are becoming an increasingly legitimate option in the DIY writers playbook. They're the new blog. Readers accustomed to buying and talking about books online, encounter electronic books in spaces where they are on equal footing with books printed on paper. In fact, I encountered Matthew Simmons's Creation Stories on Good Reads. It received a review from one of my acquaintances on the site that made me curious to read it. Did I feel cheated when I clicked on the link and discovered a pdf file that I could download for free? Of course not. I was thrilled; ten minutes later is was sitting on my desk and I read it in the park that afternoon.


So what is it? Creation Stories is a curious mix of "short prose things." It doesn't really matter what the form is (joke, prose poem, blog post) they all have a beginning middle and end. Ergo: stories.


The stories are easy to enjoy, but afterwards you'll be hard pressed to say what they're about. Simmons has a playful yet earnest approach to fiction. He uses repetition and pays careful attention to syntax to erode the received wisdom of words and create new meanings for them in the context of his stories. This is not easy to do without going down the wormhole where Samuel Beckett and Getrude Stern play ping-pong with language for eternity, but Simmons pulls it off.


QUIZTUNES FOR MATTHEW SIMMONS:


TEV: Tell me about Happy Cobra Books.


MS: Tao Lin has a poem about wanting to start a band with the poem's reader. So I wrote to him and told him we should start a band. He sent me some recordings of himself playing the drums—and one full song—and I made some guitar noises and keyboard noises and vocal noises over them, and we put them up on a Myspace page. We went back and forth on a name, and eventually it came down to coming up with a silly sounding moniker that implied two characters in opposition to one another. He was Sad Bear. I tried to come up with the opposite of a sad bear, and landed on Happy Cobra. So, Sad Bear vs. Happy Cobra.


When I met Tao on a book tour, he told me I should make a chapbook. I'd never really considered doing so, but realized that I had a bunch of short pieces and old, buried-in-the-archive posts from The Man Who Couldn't Blog that I really liked. I also had a computer at work with InDesign, an hour for lunch, and absolutely no training in either the software or graphic design in general. I had, though, read and really enjoyed David Barringer's book, American Mutt Barks in the Yard. So, off I went. For the sake of continuity, I used the Happy Cobra name.


TEV: Technically, isn't a book something that's been "printed" and "bound"? Do you comprehend my 19th century lingo?


MS: Sure. In fact, I have a few printed versions of Creation Stories. I've made 25 of the 50 I intend to print. I decided to give it away as a pdf because I said I was working on the book on my blog, and a few people were interested. But having no training in InDesign, I couldn't figure out how to make page spreads (turned out to be really freakin' easy in the end), and the file was just sitting on my computer. One day, I just decided to put the file on a website, and let people have it. I was going to give it away for free, anyway. People who have the small number of physical copies were only required to make something for me in return.

I work in a bookstore. I love books as physical objects. And sure, maybe there's some new word we need to come up with to describe deliberately collected pieces of writing bound by some sort of digital means. We could—here I'll borrow the way Barringer makes certain kinds of distinctions in American Mutt...I steal from that book all the time—go with printed books as books(p), and electronic books as books(e). But, then, a pdf file like Creation Stories or the books on Ubuweb don't have links in them, so they aren't hypertext. Maybe then we go with book(pdf) for one and and book(e) for the other. But the books on Bear Parade don't embed links in the text, still want to mimic the uninterrupted page to page flow of a book, so then we could have book(p), and book(pdf), and book(h), and book(e). Then there are those ebook reader things, which don't allow the audience to be distracted by email or two to three open windows. Book(p), book(pdf), book(h), book(e), book(r)? Seems like this could get really complicated.

TEV: What are the dimensions of the book(p)?

MS: It's about 4 1/4" by 5 1/2", but each one is cut by hand, so they are all slightly different.

TEV: And it's free?

MS: Yes.


TEV: By free do you mean "no charge"?

Yes, of course, but if readers like it, and feel at all inclined to compensate me in some way, I'd love it if they'd consider donating even a very small amount to the Puget Sound Race for the Cure. I'm running and have a donation page.

TEV: The title of your collection of "short prose things" is Creation Stories. The title implies truthiness and the subtitle won't commit to fiction. What's going on here?


MS: I tried to think of a good way of referring to the many different types of prose writing in the book(pdf)/book(p).

TEV: Could you please stop that?

MS: OK.

TEV: You were saying?

MS: Short-short fiction, prose poetry, list—some of them are just jokes, really. The connection was that they were all prose, all flush left, and I only really had a few words in which to describe them if I wanted to keep the cover uncluttered, so I defaulted to "short prose things." Maybe "stuff flush left" would've worked...Creation Stories 2: stuff flush left, maybe.

The desire for a not-so cluttered cover comes from my day job. I write the descriptions for author events at our store. Subtitles are out of control right now. Sometimes I wonder why a reader needs me at all—the subtitle says it all. Like that recent Onion joke about the Iron Man trailer covering what appears to be the entire plot of the movie. Laparoscope: One doctor's journey through the minds, lives, and intestinal tracts of his patients, with revelatory results in his personal and family life.

At first, there was a comma between "creation" and "stories" in the title. But I didn't like the way it looked, so I took it out. I think the title refers just as much to the cover image as the content. That's a drawing by an artist named Joseph Biel. It was hanging at the same gallery my brother shows at in Seattle, the Greg Kucera Gallery. It's on my wall right now. It reminds me that sometimes writing is a form of self-inflicted torture.

TEV: It is, isn’t it? In many stories you employ repetition to chip away at the meaning of words. Repetition is a kind of torture, but here you're encouraging the reader to pay attention to the way the words sound.

MS: I write longer stories, too, and there, I'm conscious of language, but it isn't necessarily the focus. When I write in a short form I like to think about the sounds of words and sentences. The impact of a short piece can't really come from the movement through a narrative arc; it doesn't come from an obsessively, intricately drawn character; it doesn't come from a full examination of the state of someone's being. For me, it comes from the language. That's almost always where I start anything I write, too: with a word or a phrase.


TEV: Some of these stories come from your blog, The Man Who Couldn't Blog, and while they have a peculiar relationship to blogging, they're stories. I think.


MS: They're something, anyway. I started the blog with this idea that it would have a simple constraint (that everything be a description of why the blogger couldn't blog that day), but I've gotten looser with the constraint as time has gone on. The Man Who Couldn't Blog is updated every Monday...or Tuesday depending on how much I had to do over the weekend. So, if the "can't blog" element seems tacked on, it's usually because it was. Sorry. I hope the rest of the piece makes up for the "tackiness."


TEV: What's next for Matthew Simmons and Happy Cobra?


MS: I have a book of short stories that I am editing and adding to. Most of the stories are out and in the hands of editors at literary journals right now—or in their slush piles, to be precise. One of them will be in the Sycamore Review at the end of the summer. It, I am happy to report, won their Wabash Fiction Prize. Beyond that, it's send out story, get rejection letter, send story somewhere else, get rejection letter, etc. for a while. But I think the book will be in good shape by fall, and I'll start looking for small publisher or short story collection prize. But, heck, maybe no one will want it. I might just put it out myself, eventually.

Happy Cobra Books has a second book in the design stage. It's a collection of stories by three writers: Chelsea Martin, Catherine Lacey, and Ellen Kennedy. I'll sew together 50 of those, give most to the writers, and then release the pdf book a little later. I make really ugly designs for really good interviews that I edit for Hobart, and there are a couple more of those in the works. Justin Dobbs and Blake Butler are collaborating on something for me. I'm also hoping to get a couple of short essays from my friends Josh Billings and Seth Pollins, but they are in the thick of their MFA work, and are likely pretty busy right now. I told Tao I'd like him to make a graphic novel for me. We'll see. Maybe only one or two of those things will happen.

Posted by Lazy Mick at 12:05 AM in Guest Bloggers |

Comments

Thanks for bringing Matthew Simmons some more attention - he deserves all he can get! A great writer. One day this archived page will be alive with academics trying to piece together his ascension toward literary priesthood.

Posted by:Shya | May 13, 2008 at 07:16 AM

You're welcome, Shya. I'm glad you liked it. This interview exposed me to all kinds of weird and wonderful writing.

Posted by:Jim | May 13, 2008 at 11:10 AM

matthew simmons is one of my favorite writers and favorite people...well done, jim.

Posted by:elizabeth ellen | May 13, 2008 at 12:23 PM

I've just discovered this blog recently, but it's great to get exposure to different kinds of writing like what Mr. Simmons has done. I look forward to being further exposed! ;-)

Posted by:Justin | May 13, 2008 at 09:17 PM

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